Microservices are all about product teams, which have everything there. They're so decoupled from one another that they're able to add new things on the side super fast. So their ability to spin up new product teams is super quick. Interestingly, I also sort of point out, you could be using one set of APIs and different products bear no relation to each other. But that's deliberate. It's not deliberate per se, as if we want things to be different but it's deliberate in the sense is we're not going to pay the coordination cost to make our API consistent.
“Spend some time looking at the system in which you work. Understand how the work is working. Understand how flow is for your organization. And then you can work to optimize that."
James Lewis is a Director at ThoughtWorks and a pioneer of microservice architecture. In this episode, we went back memory lane to the time when James first coined and popularized the microservice architecture. James described his definition of a microservice and its important characteristics. He also shared the recent microservice evolution, including the swing between microservice and monolith. In the second half, James shared his insights from complexity science related to different scaling patterns. Particularly, he explained how different hierarchy types can affect an organization’s growth rate. Towards the end, James gave some tips on how organization can detect signs of suboptimal growth and what we can do to maintain organizational agility.
Listen out for:
- Career Journey - [00:03:48]
- Coining Microservices - [00:07:25]
- Definition of Microservices - [00:14:13]
- Microservices Swing - [00:18:42]
- Scaling Law and Complexity Science - [00:24:05]
- Complex and Adaptive System - [00:40:01]
- Examining Sublinear Growth - [00:43:47]
- 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:51:19]
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James Lewis’s Bio
James is a Software Architect and Director at Thoughtworks based in the UK. He’s proud to have been a part of Thoughtworks’ journey for fourteen years and it’s ongoing mission of delivering technical excellence for its clients and in amplifying positive social change for an equitable future. As a member of the Thoughtworks Technical Advisory Board, the group that creates the Technology Radar, he contributes to industry adoption of open source and other tools, techniques, platforms and languages.
He is an internationally recognised expert on software architecture and design and on its intersection with organisational design and lean product development. After defining what was the newly emerging Microservices architectural style back in 2014, James’ primary consulting focus these days is helping organisations with technology strategy, distributed systems design and adoption of SOA.
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